Modernity

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

As modernism progresses, alienation, through shock and novelty, become defences against the boredom and inauthenticity of modernity. The inauthenticity against which modernism reacted is not in doubt. But there are, as I suggested in Chapter 7, two directions in which, under such circumstances, one might go. One can see the problem as a contingent loss of the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world and try to re-engage the right hemisphere, by patiently clearing away the adhesions of familiarity overlying one's subject; or one can see the right hemisphere's world as intrinsically inauthentic and try to sweep it away altogether.
Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time – the patient process of Romanticism) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to ‘shock’ oneself into something that feels unfamiliar) are contrary concepts. Viktor Shklovsky's call, in his essay ‘Art as Technique’, to ‘make it strange’ could represent either. It has usually been interpreted as the second, but I do not think this is what he had in mind, as his delight in Tolstoy – and in the novels of Sterne – would suggest. He noted that Tolstoy ‘describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time’, and wanted to recapture that authenticity. Indeed, although his essay was taken as a manifesto by the Formalists, it is clear that what he is talking about is not sensationalism, shock tactics or bizarre distortions at all – in fact, the opposite. ‘Habitualisation’, he writes, ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war … art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known… .’ –Shklovsky, Viktor
[The Master and His Emissary]

Spengler, Oswald wrote:

What is practiced as art today — be it music after Wagner or painting after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel — is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theaters, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will ‘catch on’ with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand today that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders’ meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of Present day Europe.
There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who practiced art, but so long as a great tradition (and therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But today we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art ‘for a living’ (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that today every single art school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art clamor which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of ‘the new style,’ of ‘unsuspected possibilities,’ theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weightlifters with cardboard dumbbells — the ‘Literary Man’ in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the art trade has organized as a ‘phase of art history,’ thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art.
Alexandria, too, had problem dramatists and box office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess today as ‘art’? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a raked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and show card effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form wealth of millennia some new ‘style’ which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the ‘man of the world,’ can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else, everything that ‘sticks to’ old ideals, is for provincial consumption.
[Decline of the West]

Signorelli, Mark Anthony & Salingaros, Nikos wrote:

To the contrary, modern art betrays a pursuit not of harmony, but of domination — domination of nature, of language, of one’s fellow man.
The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis defined by gravity, or the ‘brutalist’ exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces — a violence against the tactile environment, often falsely excused as being ‘honest’ rather than a sadistic architectural expression.
The ‘milder’ forms of this violence are represented in minimalist environments devoid of all signs of life: totally blank walls, windowless façades, curtain glass walls, buildings as cubes of glass, buildings as cubes of smooth concrete, etc.
Indeed, the subtlety that earlier attempted to camouflage this intrinsic violence has finally been abandoned, and buildings are now built as if blown apart, dismembered, and their forms melted. Consider also the jarring disjunctions of meaning and sense in modernist poetic lines like Hart Crane’s ‘Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift / Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, / Beading thy path--condense eternity’ or Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Vehemencies minus the ripe arraignment / Clapper this art taken to heart the fiction / What are those harsh cryings astrew the marshes / Weep not to hear them.’
Such passages constitute an assault on the normal conventions of linguistic usage and discursive thought, which is why Jacques Maritain claimed that the poetry of his age ‘endeavors to get free from the intelligible or logical sense itself,’ that it represented ‘a process of liberation from conceptual, logical, discursive reason.’ Or consider the deformations of the human form in painters from Picasso onwards, or worse, the displays of body parts with or without fresh blood, excrement, anything that is disgusting and revolting to our physiological systems, all of which, as Ortega y Gasset claimed, ‘betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of living beings.’
Through this stylistic violence, modernism pursues not an edification of man’s rational nature, but rather an exaltation of his unqualified will.
And behind it all is nothing but despair, betrayed by the total absence of beauty, which signifies these artists’ complete inability to imagine any reality transcending the calamitous ugliness of the modern world.
[The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism]

Yockey, Francis Parker wrote:

Appalling numbers of youth have been led into a cynical ultra-sophisticated attitude which regards drinking as a badge of social aptitude, which makes a fetish of sport and professes eroticism as a way of life. A perverted and insane pictorial art, lewd exhibitionistic dancing and jungle music form the spiritual norm of this sector of America's youth.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

The logic of consumption eliminates the traditional sublime status of artistic representation. There is, strictly, no longer any privileging of the essence or signification of the object over the image.
The one is no longer the truth of the other: they coexist in the same physical and logical space, where they also `operate' as signs (in their differential, reversible, combinatorial relation). Whereas all art up to pop was based on a `depth' vision of the world, pop regards itself as homogeneous with this immanent order of signs: homogeneous with their industrial, mass production and hence with the artificial, manufactured character of the whole environment, homogeneous with the spatial saturation and simultaneous culturalized abstraction of this new order of things.
Some will say (including the pop artists themselves) that things are much simpler: they do what they do because they want to; basically, they enjoy doing it; they look around them and paint what they see; it is spontaneous realism, etc.
This is mistaken. Pop signifies the end of perspective, the end of evocation, the end of testimony, the end of the creative act and, last but not least, the end of the subversion of the world and the curse of art. Its aim is not merely the immanence of the `civilized' world, but its total integration into that world. There is in this a crazy ambition, the ambition of abolishing the splendours (and foundations) of a whole culture, the culture of transcendence.
[The Consumer Society]

Satyr wrote:

He's chosen "value" because it implies what he cannot justify - either that a stone can judge value, or that all is energy - my position - which is being measured and given a value, which also requires consciousness to be the measuring actor.
I recall him saying that all is valuing, including non-living matter...now he's pulled back from this absurdity ascribing valuing only to the living...which is not novel or ground-breaking.
That living organisms would be attracted to energies it loses in the course of is existing - interactivity causing attritions that require replenishing and correcting -  is nothing novel.
The energies participating in an organism are constantly being lost due to existence - defined as dynamic interactivity - and the organism would be naturally attracted to said energies in order to replenish them; and obviously the organism would value said energies highly, and would desire not only to replenish them but to accumulate them in excess - hoard them and direct them to increasing its own organization using them. 
Where's the profound insight?
If he remained true to his original position - which he denied when I asked him "do stones value"? - that even non-living energies value, then this absurdity would also not be novel, since such claims have been made by many before him and will be made after him.
The use of "value" instead of energy is an attempt to pretend to be original, revolutionary....exceptional.
I suspect that he wants to imply universal intent without actually saying it openly and clearly....because he would be ridiculed.
It falls it his heritage of Afro-Asiatic superstitions - nature = deus....implying willfulness, intentionality. All is governed by an intent; all is appreciating and judging and evaluating one other.  
I've offered my positions on how matter - as in patterns of energy participating in unities man experiences as stones or rivers, clouds, metals...particles etc. - do not require intent to explain how they combine and remain unified.
The dynamics of interaction - attraction/repulsion - suffice to explain how they synthesize and remain unified until an superior external force manages to overpower the force that keeps them unified.

That living unities - life - would naturally be attracted to energies that participate in its organization is also not something new and ground-breaking.
The energies - patterns - elements, - call them whatever you like - participating in an organic unity would naturally be highly valued by the organism - their continuous loss would make this a pressing matter for the organism.
Beneath this appreciation is need...loss of energies.
So, valuing is not even the underlying cause, only the effect. 
Like I've said...the word "value" can only be used in relation to an intent - an objective - producing a triangulation between subject its object (goal) and the distance, effort, required to attain it, conferring upon the object of its desire value. 
Even if used to refer to energies then "value" is a measurement requiring a triangulation between the subject, the object being measured (energy in this case) and a measuring standard, a medium.
It's use outside these dynamics only serves alternative motives, having nothing to do with truth and world, but only about the speaker and his needs. So, in this case the misuse and abuse of the term "value" exposes a need/desire to be appreciated - highly evaluated by others, and subsequently by oneself - raising self-esteem means raising ones self-evaluation on the market place of humanity. 

What could be insanely novel is the claim that an organism - most probably only a human - can create its own reality by willing it with words, or by its intention, expressing this intent linguistically, semiotically and not converting it to activity, so as to test it against an indifferent world of no intent.
Willing it into existence, as it were....which would tie in with Nietzsche's Will to Power in a demented psyche as this.
Concealing this motive in mythological, romantic prose, could serve to produce a psychological effect on the reader - nonsense appearing to be profound insight only the "gifted" chosen ones can fully appreciate - see hope they sell fArt, like that "statue that is not there". 
The fArtist also marketed his "work" using gibberish, pseudo-intelelctual jargon that seemed to be saying something g when it was saying nothing. Someone was convinced and he paid the price. 
The loss of the one-god has made some go insane, fantasizing all kinds of possibilities.
Some may believe that the absence of an external absolute authority means that man is now to step in and become this authority - subjectivity.
Remarkably this is only possible through cooperative convictions. A single man cannot create his own reality, but a collective of men can create it as an inter-subjective project based on a shared conviction - for all intents and purposes their shared alternate reality is their reality, irrespective of what exists outside of their collective.
A memetic bubble.

Paglia, Camille wrote:

But there is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected webwork, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-century criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres. American professors have been institutionally impelled, by graduate education and then by the universities that employ them, to become narrower and narrower. The goal of comprehensive cultural vision predicated by German philology, which esteemed universal scholarship, has been dismissed as unrealistic in a modern alienated world of fragmentation and subjectivity. But the old German style, sober, practical, precise, lucid, and learned, is exactly what is needed to remedy today's confusions and excesses. Only small minds fail to see patterns and wholes.

Paglia, Camille wrote:

The rapid expansion of universities in the baby-boom era and the invention of the four-year Ph.D.—a disastrous move that devalued the doctorate and substituted hasty, pretentious, assembly-line makework for true research and learning—institutionalized the worst features of second-generationNew Criticism.

******

Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstance. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithery passivity, and inaction.
Their popularity illustrates the psychological gap between professors and students that has damaged so much undergraduate education.

******

Robert Caserio recently said to me, ‘The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.’ These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the school of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been so wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. I am in love with language, but never for a moment did I dream that language encompasses and determines all knowledge. It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy. For thousands of years, sages and mystics of both
East and West have taught us about the limitations of language in seeking truth.

1/ Modernity, born out of industrial capitalism, established itself as a movement that overturned the society of orders, rent, and status. Today we are watching an overturning of this overturning.

— Alain de Benoist (@Daily_Benoist) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

New psyop just dropped. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Friendly Esoteric Dude(FED) (@War_Dharma) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

However, besides such transformations of transcendence —we could say, into an extended humanity-there is also in modernity a thoroughgoing revenge of the occult. Precisely because no room was left in the world concept of enlightenment for the beyond (i.e., there are no enigmas, only "problems," no mysteries, only "falsely formulated questions"), consciousness, which thus was left in the lurch, sought a thousand secret paths into dark regions. Respectable occultism is a typical product of enlightenment, and its representatives are parodies of scientists who, against the skeptical world, try to defend the beyond, which for them is a certainty, and this they do by means of precisely that scientific skepticism that only acknowledges facts. Of course, that cannot work well, but that it is attempted at all shows at least a perhaps strongly justified urge. Occultism is the too often humorless and cramped drastic defense of metaphysical sensibilities against the exactions of a materialist backdrop ontology and of a repression of one's own "death" in favor of a falsely enlarged and falsely modest ego: black metaphysics, border crossings between the psychotic and spiritual galaxies, black empiricism beyond empiricism. We can predict that these neomythical tendencies will increase. They are, in reality, the things that challenge what is traditionally called enlightenment. Enlightenment must be enlightened about what enlightenment dishes up. Catastrophic processes of forgetting follow enlightenment's triumphant "learning processes" like a shadow. Because enlightenment, with its ir-resistable antimetaphysical thrust, has led to a polemical splitting off of death in the first person, it would today be apposite for it to go into the school of the opponent and to learn what is at stake when living beings experience themselves to be in alliance with "powers" that go about their affairs beyond the narrow and simultaneously puffed-up world-subjugating ego.

Critique of Cynical Reason

Everything is much better now, though, with transvestites and AI and our greatest strength. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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